Every Thing Design: The Collections of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich's Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass's iconic red "Valentine" typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand's 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum's collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects' significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.